Steven Spielberg sorry he made all those changes to E.T.

While George Lucas is visited in the night by the specter of Young George Lucas—rattling chains laden with puppet souls and softly moaning, “NOOOOOOOO!”—his self-described “best friend” Steven Spielberg has already seen the error of his ways, telling an audience at a 30th anniversary screening of Raiders Of The Lost Ark that he now repents for all of his own “special edition” sins. “I tried this once and I lived to regret it,” Spielberg said of that time he digitally inserted walkie-talkies into E.T., thereby reducing gun violence by approximately 25 percent. Yet even though our streets are safer, Spielberg says he feels bad about it “not because of fan outrage, but simply because I was disappointed in myself. I was overly sensitive to some of the criticism E.T. got from parent groups when it was first released in '82 having to do with Eliot saying ‘penis breath’ or the guns... And then there were certain brilliant, but rough-around-the-edges close-ups of E.T. that I always felt, if technology ever evolves to the point where I can do some facial enhancement for E.T., I'd like to.”

But after his those “enhancements,” Spielberg had an all-too-rare moment of clarity: “I realized that what I had done was I had robbed the people who loved E.T. of their memories of E.T. And I regretted that.” By way of penance—and reinforced by informal audience poll—Spielberg promised that the upcoming Blu-ray release of E.T. would have only the original, untouched, guns-and-penises version. Meanwhile, George Lucas began brainstorming all the ways he could incorporate those abandoned CGI walkie-talkies, if Spielberg wasn’t going to use them. [All Things Fangirl via /Film]